The EXT Family of file systems (ext2, ext3, ext4) have been ruling almost all Linux distributions for a long time and Ubuntu has been no exception. But things may no longer be the same Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Scott James Remnant of the Ubuntu Foundations team said in a blog post that plans are ON for doing work to have btrfs file system (btrfs is pronounced "Butter F S" or "B-tree F S") as an installation option and options of making it the default file system in Ubuntu 10.10 have not been ruled out yet.

Scott further mentions about btrfs from an Ubuntu point of view that:

btrfs would need to not be marked “experimental” in the kernel config; which is understand that this is planned for 2.6.35, which is the kernel version expected to ship in Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat.

btrfs is not currently supported by GRUB2 (our boot loader) or the installer; these pieces would need to be finished before Feature Freeze. If that happens, brtfs might be made the default for Alpha releases to gain testing.

For those who are ignorant about the btrfs file system, it is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone.